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Ryan: NASCAR's drastic moves aim to avert dreaded lull

It's a four-letter word that should strike fear in NASCAR executives who last witnessed it just before a white-hot growth spurt disintegrated into audience erosion and financial contraction. It's a lull.

It's a four-letter word that should strike fear in NASCAR executives who last witnessed it just before a white-hot growth spurt disintegrated into audience erosion and financial contraction.

It's a lull.

And its specter looms large on the eve of a Sprint Cup season that — before last week's announcement of a major championship rejiggering that was engineered to breed incessant plot twists — inherently seemed a placeholder currently separating NASCAR milestones.

In 2005, the sport reached its most recent zenith with record crowds and TV ratings following the second edition of the Chase for the Sprint Cup, which was captured by charismatic Tony Stewart.

The next season, which was the last under a landmark six-year network deal with Fox and NBC, brought sagging crowds and ratings dips for nearly 90% of the 36-race schedule as Jimmie Johnson won his first championship amid myriad harbingers of an economic downturn that would decimate the balance sheets of teams and tracks for the next few years.

"We're in a little bit of a lull," NASCAR Chairman Brian France said late in the season. "We have a lot of different things that are very significant going on, but they're all coming next year."

Those story lines for 2007 — the return of ESPN, the introduction of the Car of Tomorrow, the arrival of Juan Pablo Montoya — were worthy of mass anticipation and heavy promotion, but their reception felt muted.

There were grumblings within the industry that was partly because NBC shifted priorities away from showcasing NASCAR in '06 — a common strategy for a lame-duck season.

In 2000, the last year before NASCAR's first national TV deal with Fox and NBC, a 7% decline in ratings was attributed to the lack of promotion by its departing broadcast partners on cable TV.

Could there be a recurrence with reversed roles in ESPN's final year before handing the baton back to NBC?

There seemed no discernible change in ESPN's commitment in closing the 2013 season with its 17-race block, which began just days after NASCAR announced NBC as its impending replacement. ESPN President John Skipper has said NASCAR still will be covered on Sports Center and other news programming.

That has to be reassuring for those who recall the contentious era in which ESPN reporters weren't credentialed for races and were left to interview drivers on helipads outside racetracks.

But without race programming in 2015, there will be a natural decline in NASCAR's presence on a multimedia behemoth that sets the tone for national conversations and debates among fans.

And even with ironclad support from the self-proclaimed "Worldwide Leader In Sports," there are signs NASCAR needed to reassert its relevance — which might have been partially why it spent much of January teasing and unveiling seismic changes to its qualifying and championship structure that helped gin up interest in the offseason.

The introduction of a new Chase for the Sprint Cup playoff field — expanded to 16 drivers and burnished with three elimination rounds before a winner-take-all season finale among four title contenders at Homestead-Miami Speedway — guarantees the brand of drama that was deficient last year. Consider what transpired in 2013:

--There was a plethora of disconcerting developments that kept the focus from the track, starting with two dozen fans injured by debris from an airborne car in a Nationwide Series race at Daytona International Speedway and continuing non-stop through the team-orders scandal at Richmond International Raceway that overshadowed the Chase.

--Because of injuries and misfortune, three of the sport's most magnetic stars — Stewart, Denny Hamlin and Brad Keselowski — were absent from championship contention and mostly uncompetitive, which limited their impacts on shaping the weekly soap operas that propel racing's popularity.

--Johnson, the most dominant driver of his generation but not the most compelling, won a sixth championship with his typically methodical excellence. Though his battle with Matt Kenseth was among the closest in the Chase's 10 seasons, there was a dearth of indelible moments.

NASCAR ended the season without much momentum.

It's taken significantly drastic measures to stave off another lull.

Otherwise, that wouldn't be the only four-letter word being uttered along the corridors of power in Charlotte and Daytona Beach, Fla.